Shirley Hazzard in The New Yorker

The writer Shirley Hazzard, who died last month at the age of eighty-five, published her first short story in The New Yorker, in 1961, after it was pulled from the slush pile by the magazine’s fiction editor at the time, William Maxwell. The story, “Woollahra Road,” told of a little girl, restless in the heat of an interminable Australian summer, who observes her mother’s interactions with a troubled visitor. Hazzard, who was born in 1931, began her own childhood in Sydney; after the Second World War, her father joined the Foreign Service and the family moved to Hong Kong. Hazzard, who had a lifelong love of travel that figured often in her fiction, moved to the United States at the age of twenty. She married Francis Steegmuller, a Flaubert scholar, in 1963, and spent much of her life in Italy, eventually living part-time in New York and part-time in Naples and on the island of Capri. (Her 2000 memoir, “Greene on Capri,” chronicled her long friendship with the English novelist Graham Greene.)

During her thirty-year association with The New Yorker, Hazzard published several reported pieces and many works of fiction, including stories about a fictional organization modelled on the United Nations, where she worked for a time, and portions of her novels “The Transit of Venus,” which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1980, and “The Great Fire,” which won the National Book Award for fiction in 2003.

Revisiting “The Transit of Venus” in 2011, the New Yorker staff writer Tad Friend wrote that the “prose is magic on the page, somehow at once surgical and symphonic.” The story follows the lives of two Australian-born sisters over decades of their lives in postwar Britain. In a portion that ran in The New Yorker in 1979, “Something You’ll Remember Always,” the young protagonists’ lives are abruptly thrown into crisis on the story's first page: “Grace and Caroline Bell were having, all things considered, a happy childhood, when their parents drowned in a capsized ferry.” Placed in the care of their half-sister, Dora, the orphaned sisters move to a house by the sea, where they can witness with longing the ships that set sail for England:

In the slit of two headlands the Pacific rolls, a blue toy between paws. The scalloped harbor was itself a country, familiar as the archipelago a child governs among the rocks: it hardly seemed the open sea could offer more. Yet, passing into that slit Pacific, ocean liners took the fortunate to England. You went to the Quay to see them off, the Broadhursts or Fifields. . . . Sirens were blown, and kisses; streamers and tempers snapped. And the Strathaird, or Orion, was hugely away. You could be home in time to see her go through the Heads, and Caro could read out the name on the stern or bow. Even Dora was subdued at witnessing so incontrovertible an escape.

In a 2010 interview that ran on this site, Hazzard spoke of intertwined passions for reading and travel. Of her childhood in Sydney, she said that young Australians of her time were “very much pent up, with a great longing to go abroad. When I first left, it was a six-week journey from Australia to England by ship, and it wasn’t one day too long.” Both travelling and writing, she said, were ways of expanding her horizons. “As a writer, you do build on your experience, but you also create another life for yourself.”